Toronto Comic Book Expo Report
By Jamie Coville
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Date: August 26-28 Attendance: almost 37 000 fans through the weekend, I arrived at the Toronto Metro Convention Centre on Friday at 4:30 and I saw the biggest line up ever for the con. Line ups are typically quite large for this con, going outside and down the street. This time it had gone down the street to the intersection and then wrapped around back again. Some friends of mine said the Advanced Tickets lineup was very quick. I went inside and waited for Nancy. While I was standing around, a con staffer had asked me if everything was okay with me. This was a nice/odd touch, typically everybody is in such a busy rush they don't worry about the odd people out. Nancy arrived at 5pm, we got our press passes and went up. They had 3 escalators open to get folks upstairs, which is better than the typical one. I noticed the con staff opened up the two other escalators when the one was really jammed. Most of the people lined up outside did not know this and waited a lot longer than they needed to. We went upstairs to explore the new larger space and see how it all looked. They did double the floor space, which was good as it was *really* needed. Friday was incredibly busy, it looked like a Saturday. Comics again had a shrinking part of the convention, with comic retailers taking up maybe a 4th of the floor. They were on the opposite side of where all the big media stars were. In between was a lot of Horror, Manga and mixed stuff. There was a big booth selling T-shirts of all types, a lot of them comic book related. As usual there were a lot of people in costumes, not very many in superhero or comic book type costumes. A lot of anime and horror stuff. In particular the horror stuff has really boomed in this convention. Movie makers and fans have really come out for this convention. The movie makers in particular do the hard push on their movies. About 3 times I was handed a post card ad for a movie. Others at the con said when it came close to movie Time, the pushers were aggressively promoting the time and the place. Most of the movies run a bit over an hour. Anyhow, Nancy and I walked around the con looking around for Neal Adams table. It was our goal to interview him at the convention. Surprisingly, he had a table away from the rest of the pro's. No major sign or anything. Thankfully though he had two tables, one for his books and one for him. We got into a line up and Nancy got chatting with Neal's wife, whom she met in New York. When we got up to Neal, I had him autograph my Green Lantern/Green Arrow trades, I also introduced myself and he remembered my e-mails to him regarding an interview. He said "sure, come back in about a half hour!" and we did. Neal answered questions from us for about an hour. Jhonen Vasquez showed up late on Friday due to flight delays. He got to the con and began doing autographs for his fans. About the 5th person in the line dropped his pants and exposed himself to Jhonen and his wife. Jhonen, already cranky from a bad flight left the signing table but came back Saturday and Sunday. His lineups were HUGE. Afterwards we went looking through some comic bins, met up with some friends and we all went out for dinner. We left the con roughly around just before 8pm. Next morning we got to the convention a bit after 11am. We got into a long line up for a Frank Quietly and Carlos Pacheco sketch off. Luckily, Nancy and I got the very last two seats. The panel itself was somewhat boring. Quietly pencils with a very fine line and you couldn't see it very well on the screen. He also did a lot of erasing and re-drawing. Along the way Quietly answered questions from the audience, somebody jokingly asked what type of eraser he uses. He talked a bit about his time between school and getting a regular penciling gig. People asked if Quietly felt any competition with Miller and Lee in regards to All Star sales. Quietly said he felt no competition at all. The panel started somewhat late as the con folks couldn't find Carlos, so they got Karl Kerschl to fill in instead. They got the two to sketch Superman. Along the way more questions were asked. Of interesting note, somebody asked them both if they'd rather do creator owned work instead of work for hire stuff. The two artists gave each other an awkward "how do we answer this?" look. Quietly came out and said good things about both types of work, saying it's best to bounce back and forth between the two types. At the end the sketches were raffled off, everybody was happy that a young kid won one of the sketches. I ran into C.B. Cebluski at the con, which was a weird surprise. I seen him listed as doing all the Marvel related panels, which was normal - only that he recently left his Marvel job. So I asked him about it and he said Marvel asked him as a favor to go and speak on Marvel's behalf at the con, which he was doing. I asked him about our interview and he said he would answer the questions early next week. We met up with a whole bunch of people at the con. We saw plenty of Nancy's friends, I saw a few of mine - including my local comic shop owner who was there for the gaming. I also talked with Dave Day, younger brother of Gene Day. He confirmed for me the Dave Sim story of how Gene died. He spoke highly of Dave and mentioned that the first issue of Cerebus was done partially at his house with Gene doing some assisting on it. We chatted a bit with Ray Fawkes, a livejournal friend of Nancy's who has a new title from Vertigo out called Mnemovore. Nancy and I went our separate ways to do more shopping. She found a bunch of comics she was looking for in the dollar bins. I found a few books at some TPB discount places. That was the one weird thing about this con. Typically there are a bunch of people selling TPBs for 40% off or more, but there wasn't much of that this year. Of the few that were doing it, most of the books were movie adaptions. I spent less money on TPBs this year as a result. There were a lot of people in costumes, mainly anime and horror related stuff. There were a few people in comic related costumes. Usually in these things you get a couple of people in massive, major costumes. The type that cost big bucks and a lot of time to make. But I didn't see that this year. I spoke to a retailer who said there was a lot of shoplifting this year. He specifically mentioned group of kids "working" the con and stealing stuff. Security did catch them, put them into a room for a few hours and the dealers did get the merchandise back. Convention staff did tell me shoplifting is a normal problem for the convention and a number of people were caught this year. Special Note: Dealer Harley Yee has reported the theft of a box of 114 unslabbed comics at the Canadian National Comic Book Expo. Details can be found here: http://www.cbgxtra.com/default.aspx?tabid=42&view=topic&forumid=17&postid=2974 Nancy bought a lot of books. We were downstairs and she was organizing what she had bought into little piles. What was weird was a number of folks walking buy kept going "Whoa!" or "WOW!" in seeing how many comics she bought. I thought one of the main reasons for going to a comic con was to buy a bunch of back issues you needed? We left around 5pm to visit some friends. Saturday was a very busy day. Despite the doubled floor space things were still a bit crammed. While the aisles were wider, the booths were no bigger, often room for only 1 person to get around a bookshelf or a table of boxes. Add that many people (like myself) wear knapsacks, it makes for a jammed experience. It's annoying to be looking through some boxes and having people hit your knapsack every couple of minutes. Sunday we arrived at the con again around 11pm. We saw the Neal Adams panel then did more shopping. I walked around and asked several retailers how the con went for them and most of them thought it was better than last year. They were really surprised by the amount of people that showed up, particularly Friday. By 3pm Nancy had bought a small box worth of comics. We had also met up with another friend of Nancy's. We had to help drag each other out of the con as we'd all walked by tables and go "wooo.." and would want to stop and browse. Anyway, we got out of there and grabbed some food. I took Nancy home and headed back to Kingston around 5pm. This year's con was better than last years in terms of space for all the people. I didn't buy as many books but I did enjoy myself there.
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E-mail: jcoville@kingston.net
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